eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

December 2011

12/03/2011

“There is no dignity quite so impressive, and no independence quite so important, as living within your means.” Calvin Coolidge

Today I had the opportunity to read the autobiography of Calvin Coolidge. It seems odd to me that I have been teaching college courses on Vermont History for many years but have not yet done so.

I was struck by Coolidge’s basic trust in people and it is not hard to see that his policies were largely of those who expected much of himself and assumed the best of those he called neighbors. Of his father, Coolidge says

“He trusted nearly everybody, but lost a surprisingly small amount. Sometimes people he had not seen for years would return and pay him the whole bill.”

For Coolidge, I think the character of his father and that of his neighbors in Plymouth Vermont where he grew up with the default characters of all. “The neighborhood around The Notch was made up of people of exemplary habits, he says of Plymoutyh,

“Their speech was clean and their lives were above reproach. They had no mortgages on their farms. If any debts were contracted they were promptly paid. Credit was good and there was money in the savings bank. The break of day saw them stirring. Their industry continued until twilight. They kept up no church organization, and as there was little regular preaching the outward manifestation of religion through public profession had little opportunity, but they were without exception a people of faith and charity and of good works. They cherished the teachings of the Bible and sought to live in accordance with its precepts.”

In this world, there was no hierarchy or aristocracy other than an aristocracy of merit. “While he would have looked upon rank as only pretense,” he says of his father, “he looked upon merit with great respect.” He was equally impressed by the way that the people of Vermont attributed value to work as work rather than to various types of work. “They drew no class distinctions except towards those who assumed superior airs, he says,

“Those they held in contempt, They held strongly to the doctrine of equality. Whenever the hired man or the hired girl wanted to go anywhere they were always understood to be entitled to my place in the wagon, in which case I remained at home. This gave me a very early training in democratic ideas and impressed upon me very forcibly the dignity and power, if not the superiority of labor.”

And because he lived in a world where work was rewarded, he could never see the logic of creating systems that might reward anyone indiscriminately. Much of Coolidge’s fame for frugality is based on this logic and not some sort of Scroogian parsimony “What! Are there no poorhouses?” Coolidge recalls memories of collecting taxes with his father, a town official entrusted with the task.

“As I went about with my father when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid some one had to work to earn the money to pay them, I saw that a public debt was a burden on all the people in a community, and while it was necessary to meet the needs of a disaster it cost much in interest and ought to be retired as soon as possible.”

Throughout the warp and woof of Coolidges tale of life as he experienced it, we see an essential bedrock of trust in his fellow man. “It seems as though good influences had always been coming into my life, he writes,

“Perhaps I have been more fortunate in that respect than others. But while I am not disposed to minimize the amount of evil in the world I am convinced that the good predominates and that it is constantly all about us, ready for our service if only we will accept it!. . . . The ethics of the Northampton Bar were high. It was made up of men who had, and were entitled to have, the confidence and respect of their neighbors who knew them best. They put the interests of their clients above their own, and the public interests above them both.

Coolidge’s world is a good world and fair. It is a world where persistence pays off.

“If I had permitted my failures, or what seemed to me at the time a lack of success, to discourage me I cannot see any way in which I would ever have made progress. If we keep our faith in ourselves, and what is even more important, keep our faith in regular and persistent application to hard work, we need not worry about the outcome.”

It almost seems that only the tragic death of his teenage son is the only event of his life that can shake his faith in an intelligent and maternally trustworthy Providence.

The irony is that Coolidge’s belief in the goodness of the common business man may have been (I say may) been misplaced when it came to the goodness of the great industrialists who may have taken advantage of that trust to exploit laborers and consumers under his administration. He clearly had no intention of creating an oligarchy by means of his policy of deregulation and minimal government.

“In spite of his many vagaries it was shown that in saving the nation from the danger of falling under the domination of an oligarchy, and in establishing a firm rule of the people which was forever to remain, he vindicated the soundness of our political institutions.”

He speaks of his efforts to curb the ability of unscrupulous railroads to use their powers to drive competitors out of business unfairly.

“During the session I helped draft, and the Committee reported, a bill to prevent large concerns from selling at a lower price in one locality than they did in others, for the purpose of injuring their competitor. This seemed to me an unfair trade practice that should be abolished.”

If abuses were prevalent, it was not a consequence of governmental conspiracy. Following is a portion of Calvin Coolidge’s famous speech Have Faith in Massachusetts. It captures well the essence of Calvin Coolidge’s core beliefs.

“The commonwealth is one. We are all members of one body. The welfare of the weakest and the welfare of the most powerful are inseparably bound together. Industry cannot flourish if labor languish. Transportation cannot prosper if manufactures decline. The general welfare cannot be provided for in any one act, but it is well to remember that the benefit of one is the benefit of all, and the neglect of one is the neglect of all. The suspension of one man's dividends is the suspension of another man's pay envelope. . . .

Government cannot relieve from toil. It can provide no substitute for the rewards of service. It can, of course, care for the defective and recognize distinguished merit. The normal must care for themselves. Self government means self support. Man is born into the universe with a personality that is his own. He has a right that is founded upon the constitution of the universe to have property that is his own. Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are the same thing. The one cannot be preserved if the other be violated. Each man is entitled to his rights and the rewards of his service be they never so large or never so small.

. . . History reveals no civilized people among whom there were not a highly educated class, and large aggregations of wealth, represented usually by the clergy and the nobility. Inspiration has always come from above. Diffusion of learning has come down from the university to the common school, the kindergarten is last. No one would now expect to aid the common school by abolishing higher education. It may be that the diffusion of wealth works in an analogous way. As the little red schoolhouse is builded in the college, it may be that the fostering and protection of large aggregations of wealth are the only foundation on which to build the prosperity of the whole people. Large profits mean large pay rolls. But profits must be the result of service performed. In no land are there so many and such large aggregations of wealth as here; in no land do they perform larger service . . .”

“Don't expect to build up the weak by pulling down the strong. Don't hurry to legislate. Give administration a chance to catch up with legislation. We need a broader, firmer, deeper faith in the people; A faith that men desire to do right, that the Commonwealth is founded upon a righteousness which will endure . . . “

Recognize the immortal worth and dignity of man. Let the laws of Massachusetts proclaim to her humblest citizen, performing the most menial task, the recognition of his manhood, the recognition that all men are peers, the humblest with the most exalted, the recognition that all work is glorified. Such is the path to equality before the law. Such is the foundation of liberty under the law. Such is the sublime revelation of man's relation to man, Democracy!”

Question for Comment: Would you vote for Calvin Coolidge today? Why or why not?

I woke up at 4:30 this morning and could not get back to sleep so, I did what any thinking person would do. I picked up a Frederick Nietzsche book and began to read an essay on the uses and abuses of history (Nietzsche likes to write in long dense paragraphs that go on endlessly which makes for good verbal insomnia medicine).

Nietzsche believes that history should “serve the living” though he argues that it often “buries them.” History, he argues, is used to keep many people from living. “Observe the herd which is grazing beside you,” he writes:

“It does not know what yesterday or today is. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus is neither melancholy nor weary. . . .”

It is the ability of beasts to enjoy the very moment unalloyed with memory that we envy, he suggests. Man wonders why he is unable to learn to forget the past. “No matter how far or how fast he may run, the chain runs with him,” writes Nietzsche,

“It is something amazing: the moment, in one sudden motion there, in one sudden motion gone, before nothing, afterwards nothing, nevertheless comes back again as a ghost and disturbs the tranquillity of a later moment. A leaf is continuously released from the roll of time, falls out, flutters away—and suddenly flutters back again into the man’s lap. For the man says, “I remember,” and envies the beast, which immediately forgets and sees each moment really perish, sink back in cloud and night, and vanish forever.”

The philosopher who writes the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes had come to the same point. Humans have no advantage over the animals in that they can store and reflect so comprehensively on their memories.

“In this way the beast lives unhistorically. For it goes into the present like a number without any odd fraction left over,” Nietzsche suggests

“it does not know how to play a part, hides nothing, and appears in each moment exactly and entirely what it is. Thus, a beast can be nothing other than honest. The human being, by contrast, braces himself against the large and ever-increasing burden of the past, which pushes him down or bows him over.”

Only human children he argues, beings who have “no past to deny and play in blissful blindness between the fences of the past and future” can enjoy moments.

“. . . And so it moves [a man], as if he imagined a lost paradise, to see the grazing herd or, something more closely familiar, the child, which does not yet have a past to deny. Nonetheless, this game must be upset for the child. It will be summoned all too soon out of its forgetfulness. For it learns to understand the expression “It was,” that password with which struggle, suffering, and weariness come over human beings, so as to remind him what his existence basically is—a past tense that is never over and done with.”

Thus does memory become the “gravedigger of the present” as Nietzsche puts it noting that in some people, their inability to forget eventually kills their present. “There are people,” he says,

“who possess so little of this force [forgetfulness] that they bleed to death incurably from a single experience, a single pain, often even from a single tender injustice, as from a really small bloody scratch.”

Nietzsche goes on to observe three specific ways in which history is used and misused. He speaks of monumental history (where we go to history to draw inspiration for great deeds that we would achieve in the present).

“History belongs, above all, to the active and powerful man, the one who fights a great battle, who needs the exemplary men, teachers, and comforters and cannot find them among his contemporary companions.”

He then speaks of antiquarian history (where we go to history and revere it so as to render present times impervious to change), and then critical history (where we go to history and destroy the foundations of that which has come to be in our present worlds – an act precursor to demolishing what is)

In speaking of antiquarian history, he says,

“. . . Thus, antiquarian history hinders the powerful willing of new things; it cripples the active man, who always, as an active person, will and must set aside reverence to some extent. The fact that something has become old now gives birth to the demand that it must be immortal, for when a person reckons what every such ancient fact—an old custom of his fathers, a religious belief, an inherited political right—has undergone throughout its existence, what a sum of reverence and admiration from individuals and generations ever since, then it seems presumptuous or even criminal to replace such an antiquity with something new and to set up in opposition to such a numerous cluster of revered and admired things the single fact of what is coming into being and what is present.”

Of critical history he suggests that it can be made to “serve the living” by its ability to undermine the power of contemporary practices and institutions that no longer serve life.

“In order to be able to live, a person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it. He manages to do this by dragging the past before the court of justice, investigating it meticulously, and finally condemning it. Every past is worthy of condemnation, for that is how it stands with human things . . . And people or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger.”:

“These are the services which history can carry out for living,” he concludes,

“Every person and every people, according to its goals, forces, and needs, uses a certain knowledge of the past, sometimes as monumental history, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history”

Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Use and Abuse of History for Life [Revised Edition, 2010]Translated by Ian Johnston, Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, Canada.

Question for Comment: How does the work of a historian or history teacher benefit the world or incapacitate it?